words in scarlet ink

The Man From the Train is a true crime book by Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James, in which the James’ lay out the case for discovery of a previously unrealized/overlooked serial killer in North America from the 1890s until about 1912.

Bill James, a baseball historian and statistician by trade, originally started his research in an attempt to solve the Villisca axe murders, which were the rather famous unsolved murders of an entire family in Villisca, Iowa in June 1912.

In the course of investigating the Villisca murders, James expanded his search to similar cases in the United States during that time frame – and found a lot. Like, I thought it was a surprisingly large number of family murders. From 1890 to 1912, there were approximately 8 entire families murdered per year in the United States. James gave this number as average. Most of these murders were not related to the murders the James’ connected in this book – the murders linked in this book involved several pieces of evidence present/reported on at all the scenes but not linked as a pattern by law enforcement at the time. Sharing information was hard to begin with due to distance, plus law enforcement can be territorial, and most law enforcement believed there was a local connection between the dead families and whoever killed them. You can understand their reasoning. Why would you wipe out an entire family for what appeared to be no reason?

The James’ found family murders that occurred in Nova Scotia, Arkansas, Oregon, Kansas, Florida and other locations that all fit certain patterns: all of the families lived only a few hundred feet from railroad junctions in small towns with little to no police force, none of the families had a dog to warn of an intruder, the families had barns where the killer probably spent a few days watching them first, the murder weapon was always the blunt edge of an axe, the victims were usually covered with a sheet before being killed (probably to prevent spatter), the axe was left in plain sight, the bodies were moved/stacked after death, the parents almost never showed signs of a struggle but the young girls usually did, there was no apparent robbery, and some other details that consistently showed up throughout the linked crimes. James believed the motive for/major factor in the murders was a sadistic attraction to prepubescent girls – hence the girls frequently showed signed of a struggle and signs that they’d been molested after death, and that the killer had ejaculated at the scene. (Gross).

They eventually reveal a suspect in the case – an immigrant named Paul Mueller. Mueller is only ever linked to the case of a murdered family in West Brookfield, Massachusetts by contemporary sources at the time, but a physical description of a short but well built German immigrant who spoke little English and who was a German veteran of WWI appears in a local paper. He had unusually small and wide spaced teeth, and worked as an itinerant lumberjack with good wood working and carpentry skills. Considering most of the family murders investigated by James took place in or near logging communities and with an axe, the possibility of Mueller jumping on and off trains for jobs in different parts of the country and murdering an entire family as a hobby isn’t implausible.

The only year the James’ didn’t find any family murders who fit the pattern was 1908, leading them to speculate the man from the train was imprisoned for a minor crime during that time. The murders stop not long after the Villsca murders, and the James’ believe Mueller may have left the States when private investigators and the media begin to call attention to the fact that a single person may have been traveling on the nation’s railway system and killing people at an alarming rate. They’re fairly confident the same person committed at least 14 family murders for a total of 59 victims, and are less certain of his involvement in another 25 for a total of 93 victims. They also ruled out the man from the train from being the Axeman of New Orleans. Same fun axe but different patterns at the crime scenes.

James also goes into the consequences of some of these murders – one particularly haunting story was in the deep South (Georgia? Florida?) where a couple of black men (including a mentally challenged man) were lynched for a family murder the man from the train probably committed. Police targeted them and harassed them into confessing, telling the man with the IQ of a seven year old if he just tells them he did it, he can go home – you know , all the usual heartbreaking fun you find in these recurrent nightmare stories of criminal “justice” in the United States.

As one last thing to think about, James calls attention to the 1922 Hinterkaifeck murders in Germany, noting the similarities between that family murder and the murders committed by the man from the train. Again, James theorizes Mueller left the United States when the family murders began being linked by journalists and private investigators in 1911. Since we know serial killers don’t stop unless they’re caught or die, it’s not impossible Mueller committed these murders too, although there’s no proof. Even James admitted it was a toss up.

I found this book really compelling, and for whatever reason, very scary. Just the idea of someone jumping off a train, hiding in your barn/house for days/weeks/months, watching your every move, then murdering whole families was so creepy and upsetting to me. Scholars of this sort of thing find James’ & McCarthy James’ theory plausible and even the best possibility for solving the Villisca murders. It’s safe to say that after 110+ years, we’ll never know what happened for sure, but the case for a serial killer who went undetected for two decades is quite compelling here. And as we know, the term “serial killer” wasn’t used until decades later and are weren’t understood (better understood, anyway) until much later.

The writing could be a bit informal at times, but for the most part I found the writing engaging and interesting. I highly recommend The Man From the Train. Is some of it speculating? Yes. But while the named suspect (Paul Mueller) might not be correct, I think the case that the same person committed multiple family murders over a vast swath of North America has more than been made here. Fascinating book, wonderful job by Bill James and his daughter.